What Fiza has to tell Bollywood today

In his illustrious career, Khalid Mohamed has been a journalist and a national cultural editor at the Hindustan Times, as well as the editor of Filmfare. He has made films and written about them. Many a time it happens that when a film critic is harsh towards a film (Khalid has given five-star ratings to very few films), they are asked if they can make a film themselves. Khalid happened to transcend that criticism, and did suitably well.In his 2000 film Fiza, he told the story of the Ikramullahs, a modest Muslim family based in Mumbai. The film is set in the context of the 1993 Mumbai riots; when the chaos breaks out, their only son, Amaan, goes missing.The widowed mother, Nishatbi, visits the police station and thinks every knock on the door could help bring back her estranged son. Nishatbi has only two children: Amaan and the elder Fiza. A resolute Fiza is more practical in her approach. She mortgages her trousseau jewellery and goes on a mission to find her brother.When she does find him, he is no longer her light-eyed younger brother, but a wanted militant. He has joined a terrorist organisation after being recruited by Murad Khan, played by Manoj Bajpayee. Amaan talks of Jihad, with a tear and shine in his eyes. He recalls the pile of dead bodies he saw, and the deadly mob he escaped from. He talks of the now-defunct Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, infamously known as TADA, and how it was used to torment people. The film’s account of his radicalisation is tied directly to the violence he witnessed and the sense that the state had failed him.Also Read | Longing has a gender in Imtiaz Ali’s cinemaIt is worth noting that Hrithik Roshan, who was just one film old as a hero, his previous film being the romantic chartbuster Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai (2000), chose to play Amaan. So did mainstream superstar Karisma Kapoor and veteran Jaya Bachchan, who acted in the striking film about the consequences of communal politics. Fiza was released just months after Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai which had made Roshan a major new star.Khalid’s protagonist is dealing with the aftermath of communal violence on his psyche. This is a rare occurrence in Hindi films, the fact that his radicalisation is not absolute. So when he realises that his sister is seeing a Hindu guy, Anirudh Roy, played by Bikram Saluja, he does not ask him to stay away from her. Instead, he tells him that he should take care of her. It is not what you expect from him. Amaan has been recruited into a militant organisation and speaks in the language of Jihad, yet his affection for his sister survives his political radicalisation. But Khalid’s Muslim characters are nuanced. In no way does he justify Amaan’s actions, all of which have consequences.What Khalid also does interestingly is how he portrays the riots. The 1992-93 riots have been described by various scholars as an anti-Muslim pogrom, while the Srikrishna Commission found that the Shiv Sena and its leaders played a major role in the January 1993 violence, with Bal Thackeray issuing directives that contributed to organised attacks on Muslims. The Commission also found a built-in bias in sections of the police force against Muslims. Khalid doesn’t state this out loud. In fact, in one scene, Fiza meets a Hindu man who has lost his senses after losing his only son to a Muslim mob. As much as he wants to despise Fiza’s religion, a part of him realises they are both victims of something bigger, orchestrated and unnatural. So, Khalid might be showing the plight of one Muslim family amid a country where a 16th-century mosque was razed by a Hindutva mob, but his stance is more universal: a Hindu leader and a Muslim leader join forces for political impetus, even if it means bloodshed between both of their communities. Khalid seems to know that hate is spewed and mobs are incited, while those who do so are rarely affected.Fiza isn’t the only film that shows the Bombay riots. Mani Ratnam named one of his classic films after the city and set it against the backdrop of the riots. In Bombay (1995), an interfaith Tamil couple elopes to the city after their parents refuse to accept their relationship. The riots then kill members of both their families and barely spare their twin boys.

Mani Ratnam’s Bombay (1995) follows an interfaith couple caught in the communal violence that engulfed the city. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement Filmmakers like Ratnam and Khalid want people to never forget that in this cosmopolitan city known for its liberal values, people were killed for their religious identity. Fiza might come off as preachy to some, in moments like when a radicalised Amaan tells Fiza, “Even in this deserted area, everyone knows what was happening in that city that is considered the most modern in India”. It is an interesting juxtaposition that Khalid uses: the fact that India’s most advanced city could not do away with communal hate. That in a city where people from all over the country migrate to live a life where labels aren’t everything, the same communal dynamics are at work.Fiza and Bombay were not the only films asking these questions in the 2000s. Aparna Sen’s 2002 film Mr and Mrs Iyer featured a married, conservative Tamil Brahmin woman who would place her infant in the lap of a Muslim man she had just met to save him from a deadly Hindu mob. Jehangir “Raja” Chowdhury, played by Rahul Bose, becomes the titular Mr Iyer. The film starts with a couplet from the 10th-century poet-saint Devara Dasimayya: “For what shall I wield a dagger, O Lord? What can I pluck it out of or plunge it into when you are all the world?” The film’s pantheistic question is simple: how do you separate the creator from his creation? And the message is even simpler still: humanity continues to exist despite the varying degrees of “us vs them” present in all of us.In 2008, Nandita Das set her film Firaaq in Ahmedabad in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots. The terrible communal violence killed hundreds across the State, particularly from the Muslim minority. Like Fiza, Firaaq is also interested in the aftermath. The Hindu relatives of a wealthy interfaith couple think the Muslim husband is overreacting when he wants to move to Delhi. A poor Muslim domestic worker finds it difficult to believe that her Hindu friend was not involved in burning and looting her house. An oppressed Hindu housewife cannot get over the Muslim woman she failed to save from a mob. In Firaaq, Muslims are scared to be, while some Hindus cannot live with their bruised conscience.Khalid’s creative treatment of the anxieties of Indian Muslims is not limited to Fiza. In the films he wrote for Shyam Benegal, particularly the three in Benegal’s Muslim women trilogy, Mammo (1994), Sardari Begum (1996), and Zubeidaa (2001), the Muslim identity of his titular protagonists is not limited to surnames, Islamic greetings and a heavy usage of Urdu. Mammo cannot stay for long in the India she called home before 1947. Sardari’s syncretic values lead to her death in a communal riot. Zubeidaa marries a Rajput prince, but loses her mind and eventually her life because she never receives the respect his first Hindu wife commands. Her love, beauty, green eyes and youth cannot hide her Muslim identity. All three films were written by Khalid Mohamed, and Zubeidaa was based on the life of his mother, Zubeida Begum.The Muslim socialLast year, a young Muslim filmmaker tried reviving the genre with The Great Shamsuddin Family, whose protagonist Bani is a divorced writer racing to complete a submission for a university in the US. The film follows her headspace over half a day: a male cousin has arrived with an interfaith marriage crisis, a mob could be at their door, and family emergencies keep piling up. The film’s premise explicitly includes interfaith marriage and fearful mob justice, using the family apartment as a space to examine contemporary anxieties around Muslims, women and India. A childhood friend asks her if living in the US will prevent her from hearing the voices from back home. It is not a question meant only for her, much like the questions Amaan asks Fiza. It is also directed at the viewers, with the intention of confronting them with their biases.

A still from The Great Shamsuddin Family, a contemporary Muslim family drama centred on interfaith marriage, social anxiety, and the threat of mob violence. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement Cut back to year 2026. A.R. Rahman had to issue a clarification and apology after facing backlash for suggesting that communalism might be one of the factors behind his reduced work in Bollywood. In a BBC Asian Network interview, Rahman said the volume of his Hindi-film work had declined over the previous eight years and suggested that “a communal thing” might have played a role. He later said his remarks had been misunderstood and that he had never intended to cause pain. Muslim social as a film genre is almost extinct in the wild. Khalid has not made a fiction film in 21 years. His last fiction feature was Silsiilay in 2005. He has since made documentaries, including The Master, a 90-minute tribute to Shyam Benegal.Also Read | A new kind of Muslim socialIn an interview with film critic Subhash K. Jha, he said, “I feel torn apart with the rise of segregation and non-inclusivity. I’ve directed and written films only with Muslim characters and their conditions, the ‘fiza’ around them. No financier/producer wants them today. So end of my stories, on the screen at least.”The irreversibility of communal violenceIn the end, Amaan is on the run after shooting two opportunist politicians. Fiza catches up with him, only for him to hand her the same gun he used to kill the politicians, asking her to use it to kill him. And she does. Perhaps Khalid doesn’t think this “terrorist” deserves a happy ending. No extrajudicial killing or TADA for his protagonist, only death at the hands of Fiza, his sister and the film’s morally resolute protagonist. It is a conventional ending, but even then it disturbingly stays with you, along with the scene where Nishatbi sees her son kill two men after getting into a scuffle with them, and she walks into the sea to commit suicide. Jaya Bachchan’s performance is sublime. The film’s plot makes clear that Nishatbi’s despair comes from the realisation that her son has returned physically, while the son she knew is gone.Perhaps the mother realises that her estranged son might have come back, but only physically. She can never get his old self back. Perhaps Khalid’s larger argument, at the core of Fiza, is that those who survive communal violence are altered irreversibly. Hindi cinema has not explored such complex arguments often enough after that, and perhaps it should explore them again.Sarthak Parashar is a Delhi-based freelance journalist.